Rent: a great treat for the holiday season

Opening the day before Thanksgiving, Rent is not your typical holiday movie. Instead of cute little cartoon animals and family fun, Rent is a film about sex, drugs, poverty, disease and, most importantly, love. This love may not be the typical love that most moviegoers are used to seeing, but it is love nonetheless.

Rent, which is based on the rock opera of the same name, focuses on a group of struggling artists living in the slums of New York’s East Village during the early 1990′s. These artists’ relationships with one another propel the action of the film, which spans a one year time period. When the movie opens, we are introduced to a pair of roommates, Roger (Adam Pascal) and Mark (Anthony Rapp), on Christmas Eve. They are just trying to stay warm inside their rundown apartment after their evil landlord Bennie (Taye Diggs) turned off their power.

Bennie is an old friend who decided to marry rich and now wants to install a money-making multimedia studio in the neighborhood. Because they are his old friends, Bennie has allowed Roger and Mark to live in his building without rent, but now he needs a favor. In protest of Bennie’s new development project, Mark’s lesbian ex-girlfriend Maureen (Idina Menzel) is putting on a performance piece on New Year’s Eve. In order to keep receiving free rent, all Bennie asks is that Mark and Roger persuade her to stand down.

Throughout the rest of the film, many other relationships develop including two love triangles. Roger and Bennie both fall for Mimi (Rosario Dawson), an exotic dancer who can’t seem to kick her heroin habit. Also, Roger fights feelings for Maureen while befriending Joanne (Tracie Thoms), Maureen’s lover.

The most memorable relationship and performances, though, come from Wilson Heredia and Jesse L Martin, who play a gay, HIV positive couple. Heredia’s Angel is a street drumming transvestite whose wild antics steal almost every scene he, or she if you will, is in. Martin’s more straight-laced Tom Collins plays a great counterpart to Angel as we see the couple fall in love across the course of the film. Because both men spent many years performing the parts together in the original stage version, a certain comfort level exits between the two actors. Their scenes never feel forced and come off very naturally on screen. This in turn, allows the audience to see them not just as two gay men, but as a couple that truly loves one another.

The film works on many different levels, ranging from entertainment to social commentary. The cast consists of a wide range of different races and ethnicities, but their differences are surprisingly not an issue. They are a family, and skin color does not separate them.

The music is often very uplifting and funny, while touching on very serious issues. Because it is an opera, there is very little actual dialogue between the characters, so the songs have to convey feelings while still driving the story. For the most part, director Chris Columbus succeeds with only an occasional lapse, the biggest of which comes at the climax of the film.

What could be called the ninth and most pivotal character of the film is the AIDS virus. Half the characters are infected with the virus. We are never told how most of them contracted the deadly illness, and it really does not matter. They are not judged by their friends who were lucky enough not to be infected, and it is implied that we should not either. They are all humans who have feelings of love, and that, in the end, is what matters.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 11 2005. Filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry